Father, Son and Other Animals
Father, Son and Other Animals is an illustrated short story collection which explores climate change and species extinction through the lenses of parenting and creative practice. It’s funnier than it sounds. Order online from Cordite Books, or ask your local bookstore to order it in for you.
I was overseas in late 2019, watching the devastation of the Black Summer Bushfires unfold in news stories and on social media. I understood intellectually what was happening, but I couldn’t process it emotionally. It seemed stranger than fiction. Then as I flew home into a landscape that didn’t look, feel, or smell like home, the emotional reality hit me.
My father encouraged me to draw, as a way to anchor myself when I felt untethered. In turn, I encourage my son to draw, to help him process his observations of the world and to connect with me, through a shared creative outlet. This book is a meditation on these intergenerational relationships, but also an effort to find ways to tell my son — and myself — stories that might ground us in place, give us pause to bear witness to the rapid changes unfolding around us, in a way that retains a sense of hope by celebrating wonder and absurdity of the natural world.
JAMES BRADLEY writes in his introduction:
I want more books with the complexity and intelligence of Father, Son and Other Animals. Not just because we’re going to need them if we’re to find ways of processing and commemorating the transformation of the world, but because we need to find ways to live and celebrate as well as to mourn and rage.
The book’s sophisticated interweaving of text and image, grief and humour, wisdom and bafflement does just that, capturing not just the dislocation of our historical moment, but also the bonds of love and care that bind us to each other. Simultaneously painful, funny and profound, it is a small marvel of a book.
KATE MILDENHALL:
a tiny, perfect book […]
to be read in an afternoon, and savoured and
poured over for much longer after that.
CERIDWEN DOVEY:
a stunning gem of a book, so brutal and so beautiful […]
Sadokierski has slowed time down and condensed precious,
ordinary moments of life and preserved them in amber.
W.H. CHONG:
Replete with glancing intimacies.
I found it delicate and moving,
saddening and joyful, pained and tender.
The writer is aghast and tremulous at the world we have wrought,
what our children face, what we must face.
My Preface to the book:
After my parents’ dinner parties, I’d pour dregs from wine bottles into saucers for the fairies – white wine for the good ones, red for the wicked. The red always disappeared faster, which I took as proof that naughty people have more fun. I didn’t really believe that fairies drank the wine but equally, I didn’t not believe either.
As a parent, I am tuning back to that curious magic of childhood; the naive ambivalence that accepts the existence of tooth fairies and flying reindeer; the unadulterated wonder at new things; the unexpected grace of an ibis in flight; the dinosaur shriek of a sulphur-crested cockatoo; the shocking weirdness of a Gymea lily in bloom; the otherworldly-warble of currawongs as dusk settles in.
Yet, as wonder flows back into my daily life, so too does the creeping realisation that we are living in a time of overlapping and escalating environmental crises. What stories will prepare my son for a future that frightens me? For me, there is no overarching narrative or truth, no heroic figure who will lead us to salvation from this mess we’re in. Instead, sense is made from paying attention to the assemblages of people and other animals who we move among on a damaged planet. I read and write and draw to make sense of a world I no longer recognise.
